The bus inched its way toward the building and then stopped. I heard the grating, mechanical sound of a large gate opening. I’d complained about them, but the two uniformed guards who sat behind the driver and in front of a security gate had just smirked. My hands were swollen and tingled from the tightness of the handcuffs. It was bone-aching cold on the bus and my summer clothes (which I’d had on when I was arrested more than six months earlier) were not enough to keep me warm. And the gun towers, manned by two men with automatic weapons. But then I saw the soaring double chain link fence, topped by rolls of razor wire that ran around the complex. Instead, it looked like a rural junior college campus…. Some mammoth, gothic structure with battlements and ramparts. I’d expected to see something more sinister. Lake Butler Correctional Institution, the maximum security prison that would be my home for the next three years. Through the streaked window, I saw the prison a half-mile ahead…. I stretched my neck to see past the bulk of the brown-uniformed driver. I sat near the back of an unheated Bluebird bus as it turned down a narrow country road about 10 miles north of Gainesville, Florida. Excerpt from ‘BACK FROM THE ABYSS: The Autobiography of a Low-Bottom Alky’
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